1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to an information processing in which a servers are linked and provide a merchandise delivery service.
2. Description of the Related Art
Merchandise sales services are widely used among the many internet services. A user of merchandise sales services on the internet selects merchandises using a web browser, inputs his/her address and name and makes payments using credit cards etc. Then, a provider of merchandise sales service delivers merchandise to a specified delivery address. Almost all providers of merchandise sales services do not provide communication services between a plurality of users using the merchandise purchased by each user.
On the other hand, there are also Internet services which provide communication services between a plurality of users. Electronic mail is the most well know of these services. Electronic mail is a service which provides a means of communication between acquaintances using an electronic mail address as an identification tag for uniquely specifying a user on the internet. In addition, in recent years, many services are appearing which provide a means of communication between users in a web service using an identification tag for uniquely identifying a user within each web service. SNS (Social Network Service), chat, blogs etc are examples of these services (ref. U.S. Pat. No. 7,069,308).
An acquaintance list function is provided in an Internet service which provides such a communication means between users for each user to manage acquaintances in the service. For example, electronic mail client software, web electronic mail, SNS, chat, blogs etc have a function for managing acquaintances.
Generally, entire acquaintance relationships within internet services which provide a means of communication between users are referred to as social graphs. This is because when each user is express as a point (node), it is possible to represent each user's list as a line (edge) which connects pairs of different nodes. That is, these relationships are called social graphs meaning human relationship graphs because it is possible to display entire acquaintance relationships within internet services as a graph.